[SXSW] StartupBus crazy (but viable) ideas

Take 8 US cities far from Austin, Texas (easy). Have 8 buses ready to make the journey between the cities and home of SXSW. Fill these buses with young and ambitious dudes willing to prove they can be entrepreneurs. Let the whole thing mix for 3 days. Get the geeks out of the bus in Austin. Don’t feed them, don’t wash them. Here are the greatest ideas I saw at the final of this fertile experiment.

Gourmair : fresh food from everywhere. A marketplace to make premium/gourmet food deli and upmarket consumers willing to have the food delivered at home. The business model thinks of a 45 million people « upper middle income Americans » potential market, wish them luck (and appetite). Here’s a convincing mockup of the would-be site. Follow them @gourmair

Spott is web content turned (again) into poetry. Tired of clicking on your screen(s) to access a video, a picture, a song ? Spott offers to litteraly live the content by being able to access it… only at the place it was uploaded. Have a sudden strong feeling on Myrtle Beach ? Upload a pic or a song. Make it available for others. Others who, like you, will come to Myrtle Beach, and may then understand why you uploaded the pic/song just here. It’s content put back in its original content, it’s awesome, I love it. Follow them here : @Spott_App

Bumpercrop, back to local food ! One American out of ten has a garden with vegetables and fruit in it. Tons of people are sick of supermart plastic food and wish they could eat local and organic if possible. Bumpercrop makes this possible by being a marketplace for amateur growers and locavore people. Add a freemium business model and you have a ready-to-go app for all fresh food lovers. Follow @_BumperCrop

Adventeur is another way your phone can disturb your daily and regular life. We always go the same way in town. And when abroad, we rarely make a single move without consulting all this maps, guides and social advices. Adventeur is the key to (re)discovering surroundings. Open the app and your GPS, and let Adventeur gives you hints about what to do around you and see what’s on the street just one block away. A very large market of 2,3 billion tourists and 1,9 billion local restaurants to name only one the possible proposed spots. Follow @Adventeur

Cerealize, the punchiest presentation of the day, was about bringing your breakfast what you really want. Because yeah, we all love muesli, but we all sort it to get way with these strange bits of apple/nuts/chocolate. Cerealize offers to prepare a customized brand of cereals for you, with bases and extras, and to have it delivered to your home. With one American out of two eating cereals at breakfast, guess you will hear from them soon. Follow them @Cerealize

Happstr, then, feels like our buses dudes thought out of any known box to present a very easy and funny concept. You’re happy ? Just make Happstr know about it in one click. And this is it ! Then, you’re able to visualize on a map who and where are the happy folks you could connect with. What’s the point ? For you, maybe not much. For marketing and advertisers, knowing when, where, with who and why people are happy are a golden data. You’ll find them on @Happstr
A conclusion of these great ideas ? Yes.

1. Food matters. It can be confusing in a SXSW waiting for geolocalized social discovery apps. Being 3 days without sleeping, and probably eating randomly, proved to be a good pressure on stomach, and on ideas.
2. Geolocalization matters too ! Be it for making offer and demand meet (BumperCrop, Gourmair) or put us back in reality (Spott, Adventeur), the apps are about one’s local environment.
3. As crazy as might sound some ideas, we’re in America. Where start-ups mean business. All these young and hungry guys did show at least one or two slides of potiental market and business model.

Again, thanks StartupBus and SXSW for this moment of creativity, youngst and good mood 🙂

Martin Pasquier
@martpasquier